In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depl

In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depletion would inevitably lead to collapse if climate change didn’t first. Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations. We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago. GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important. Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)